New Bedford Science Café on Youth Football and CTE

New Bedford Science Café will host their next event at Greasy Luck located at 791 Purchase St. in New Bedford on Tuesday, October 2 from 6 to 8 pm. Their guests are Laney Evers and Bobby Abdolmohammadi, research assistants in Boston University School of Medicine’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center. This event is open to the public and Free to attend. There will be food and beverage for purchase.

CTE is a progressive degenerative brain disease found in athletes (and others) with a history of repetitive brain trauma, including symptomatic concussions as well as hits to the head that do not cause symptoms. CTE is associated with memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, and, eventually, progressive dementia.

Ongoing research at BU’s CTE Center has contributed to a new national awareness that youngsters who play youth tackle football are more at risk for cognitive and behavior problems later in life. The Center’s brain bank is the largest CTE tissue repository in the world.

Laney and Bobby will explain how they coordinate brain donations, examine brain donors’ medical records, and interview family members, friends, and teammates to understand how exposure to head injuries relates to changes in the donor’s behavior and damage from CTE. “It's a thorough way of trying to get a narrative of each of the donors' lives and their symptoms,” explained Bobby. Although the mean donor age is mid-50s, donors have been as young as 13 years old. “We have a considerable number of young donors who have passed away prematurely,” said Laney. Their families “reach out to us because they have concerns about the level of exposure [to head trauma] their loved ones had over their lifetime and the symptoms they were experiencing around the time of their death.”

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